Best practices for Integrated project management
Almost every industry has inculcated the practice of project management to overcome the snags of managing. Project management is nothing but the application of knowledge and skills applied to project activities to meet the stakeholder’s needs and expectations from a project from a project. Most of the project management solutions are designed to meet the enterprise goals which include cost estimation, automated process aligned to the business, managing resources, allocation of tasks to resources, timesheet to capture time details of task execution, reporting, and management visibility through Dashboard etc. Good project management provides the facility to integrate the solution with third-party or vendor neutral solutions by applying the some of the following practices.
Task management– When working with limited resources, it is easy to manage and follow up Tasks. On the contrary, as the organization grows it becomes imperative to obtain a tool for managing tasks. An effective tool will allocate the right task to the right resource at the tight time.
Timesheet Management– A project is planned with estimated start and end times. As and when a project starts, resources get involved in accomplishing the tasks. To evaluate the time spent on resources on accomplishing tasks, a timesheet is required. Timesheet was originally used to determine the employee payroll of an organization. In project management, timesheet is used to track the actual effort spent be resources to accomplish tasks. The timesheet provides the actual breakdown of actual time spent on the tasks that are accomplished throughout the lifecycle of a project. This allows the project manager to get information about the effort spent on the project, enabling him to create analysis reports for the management analyze the different ways the actual effort spent by the resources involved in a project.
Resource management– Optimized allocation and planned involvement of resources determine the success of a project. Planning with resources is a huge task for project managers as they have to consider the estimated budget and duration of a project. Whenever a resource gets involved in a project, the management has to estimate the cost of the particular resource. Projects have numerous requirements and these get deployed through several releases. It is the project manager who has to determine the key requirements that need to be implemented in the first release. Manual distribution is appropriate when you are dealing with a small list of items. But in cases where there are a large number of requirements, it would be a mammoth task to do this distribution manually. A suitable application performs these requirements distribution automatically, based on the constraints defined and the rank assigned to each of the requirements will make resource management much simpler.
Reporting and dashboard capabilities Dashboard is a planned and combined display of information for users to take a quick decision on the performance of various departments. As management usually prefers to view reports from a centralized location, the dashboard is a popular tool to generate various types of reports and making decisions. – easy to read information at one place, display of different sets of data in multiple formats, visual clarity, access to real time data, and something not easily achievable with other means of data analysis. It helps the decision makers or the management with ideas as to how to go about implementing potential improvements and solutions.
Best practices for integrated project management helps to give development groups the freedom of choosing their own project hierarchy. Applications like application lifecycle management, work to provide unprecedented advantages to a development organization to implement ALM in the most optimal manner. An Integrated enterprise service bus allows for a unique process automation of each of these applications thus allowing the users to implement any development methodology including a proprietary one.